Book Description

Many Americans are enjoying the fruits of prosperity. Unemployment and inflation are low and it seems that everyone is driving a sport utility vehicle. But is this a prosperity that's reserved for the upper middle class, the folks driving the Jeep Cherokees? Or is something more fundamental happening? The answers are crucial for anyone interested in how America is changing--from corporate executives to policy makers to the average person keeping up with current issues. Bob Davis and David Wessel have spent thousands of hours in living rooms and workplaces around the country, and they show conclusively that the recent good economic news not only is here to stay but is the start of twenty years of broad-based prosperity. Prosperity tells stories about how the lives of the middle class are changing for the better. These are the people who are still being wrongly consigned b y prophets of doom and gloom to the sidelines of the new high-tech economy. People like: Randy Kohrs, whose training in respiratory therapy at a local community college has lifted him from dead-end, minimum-wage jobs into the ranks of the middle class Teresa Wooten, a former worker in a low-wage South Carolina clothing factory, who is now a supervisor in a German-owned factory The workers at the Allen-Bradley plant in Milwaukee, who are benefiting in wages and transferable job skills form the company's recent computer automation These and many other remarkable stories bring together the three trends that will be the basis for a new, middle-class prosperity: Our $2 trillion investment in computer and communications technology will finally pay off in faster productivity growth, a morerapidly growing economy, and rising living standards. Community colleges are helping millions of Americans move from $7-an-hour jobs. This unheralded change in U.S. education will help reverse the forces that have widened the chasm between more-educated and less-educated workers. Globalization--much maligned by pundits on the left and the right--will create new and better jobs by U.S. companies that export to developing countries and by foreign companies that build plants and offices in the United States. Davis and Wessel's front-line account, combined with persuasive evidence of the tangible benefits reaching the middle class, proves that the American dream is not only alive and well, but will reach more people than ever before.